Reader’s warning: I am about to break the Dragon Pit ceiling with ALL of the latest House of the Dragon episode review spoilers so if you haven’t watched it yet, avert your gaze!
Fetishes, badassery and plotting of the highest degree are lighting up this slow paced episode of the House of the Dragon.
Recap:
We return to the Red Keep in the hours of the dark dawn after King Viserys I (Paddy Considine)’s overdue passing and the news has travelled quickly between the servants. Alicent (Olivia Cooke) is awoken by her handmaid Talya (Alexis Raben) with the news. Alicent quickly calls together the Small Council for a meeting to discuss the way forward. There she learns that while she was caring for the dying King, her father, the Hand (Rhys Ifans) and several of the other Small Council members have been planning on usurping Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and replacing her with Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) for the past 20 years and are now ready to implement it. It does include some blood shed though: Rhaenyra, Daemon (Matt Smith) and all of their children will be put to the sword and killed.
Alicent is horrified by her father Otto’s gruesome plan. She is adamant that Rhaenyra be given the chance to bend the knee (yes, there is that Game of Thrones quote we all so dearly love!) to her brother and her children’s lives be spared. Alicent knows that Viserys loved his daughter and his grandchildren – he wouldn’t want them to be harmed.
While Otto and the others placate Alicent with some half-hearted assurances, our rejected f***boy Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) is taking no shit and will not stand for any slander against his Queen Alicent. He totally loses the plot by smashing Lord Beesbury (Bill Paterson)’s head into the Council table and killing him when Beesbury dares to challenge Aegon’s supremacy over Rhaenyra. Dude… Rhaenyra rejected you 20 years ago, Get the f*** over it already!
Lord Westerling (Graham McTavish) , Lord Commander of the Kingsguard will not stand for this insolence nor the usurping of his rightful Queen Rhaenyra. After threatening to kill Cole for his treasonous act, Westling gives up his command and gold cloak and resigns. That, my Lords and Ladies, is f***ing loyalty right there! If the name Westerling sounds familiar to book readers of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, remember that Jeyne Westerling is Robb Stark’s wife and his Queen Consort.
You would think that killing a Lord and member of the Small Council would for sure get Cole sentenced to death but you’d be wrong. Alicent promotes him to Lord Commander of Aegon’s Kingsguard. Gods! The now Green Council rounds up and imprisons all of the servants who know about Viserys’ death so that no one can spread the news or let Rhaenyra, who is on Dragonstone, know that her brother is stealing her Iron Throne.
At least he would be, if he could be found. Alicent and Otto realise simultaneously that they have misplaced their Heir and send each of their own men to track the wayward Prince down. For Lord Otto, it is the until now little seen twins, Erryk and Arryk Cargyll (Elliot and Luke Tittensor). Erryk is Aegon’s sworn knight and shows his brother the depravity he has been exposed to because of the Prince in Flea Bottom. In addition to being a known rapist, Alicent’s f***tard son has been making his own bastards fight in underground child fighting rings to the death. Gods!!!
The Queen sends Criston and her son Aemond (Ewan Mitchell who continues to be my kind of crazy but hot crush!) in search of Aegon. Whilst cosplaying as Daemon and Rhaenyra on their long-forgotten hot date night, Cole and One-Eye bond over being the much overlooked martyrs of their worlds. Aemond knows that he would actually be a better choice as the usurper King because he is educated, is more caring and rides the largest dragon in all of the Seven Kingdoms.
While the search for Aegon continues, Otto and Alicent are dealing with some Rhaenyra supporters in their own ways. Otto makes the great Lords and Ladies of the Realm bend the knee to Aegon in his absence and hangs any deserters. Alicent tries to appeal to Princess Rhaenys (Eve Best) AFTER she had her locked up all day. Are you nuts, Green Mad Queen, to imprison the Blood of the Dragon?! Oh, there will be hell to pay for this!
Alicent and Rhaenys have an epic standoff where the former tries to stroke the Princess’s ego by telling her that she should have been chosen as Queen at the Council in 101 AC, not Viserys. Rhaenys appraises Alicent in a different light but it isn’t enough to quell her ire at being mistreated. This was a classic line:
Alicent, after leaving Rhaenys, confronts her father Otto about how he used her for his own greedy and self serving needs, selling her in marriage at 15 to the old Viserys and trying to rule the kingdoms through her and her son. She will no longer stand for it and will not hear any more talk about murdering Rhaenyra and her children.
Before we cheer for the suddenly courageous Alicent, let us pause for a moment and see just what she’s been up to with that slimy creep Ser Larys Strong (Matthew Needham). In a scene that is going to haunt me for all of my days, Alicent gives Larys more and more sight of her bare feet to wheedle more information out of him. The sexual coercion continues until Larys is seen pleasuring himself while staring at Alicent’s feet and she looks away, disgusted and horrified but it is obvious it isn’t the first time.
Because I cannot be nauseated alone, here you go:
Aegon is returned to Alicent, forcibly by the twins, after Daemon’s ex-lover Myseria aka The White Worm (Sonoya Mizuno) negotiates with Otto to stop the underground child fighting and keep his vile grandson in check.
Aegon, initially reluctant to take his sister’s crown because he knows his father never loved him and didn’t want him to rule, rises to the occasion as the small folk cheer for him at his “coronation” in the Dome on top of the Dragon Pit. Cue end credits and a happy ending, right?!
Come now, this is a GOT show and you know what Ramsay said about happy endings:
Like Maleficent showing up at Aurora’s christening unannounced in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Princess Rhaenys, having been rescued from her tower by one of the twins and then lost in the overwhelming stream of the public, sneaks down to the Dragon Pit to get her dragon Meleys and makes the most epic entrance in Westeros since before Daenerys will do so 200 years later… She and Meleys break THROUGH the bottom of the Dome and crush the laymen to stare Alicent, Aegon and their supporters down!
What a girl boss for literally breaking the (stone) ceiling!
While she doesn’t burn them all to a crisp, she does give the royal family a glance that would make even the Night King quake in his glass boots. No one f***s with the Blood of the Dragon. NO ONE!I
impressions:
The GOT verse is known for giving us kickass episode 9s of every season. One thinks of the Battle of the Bastards, The Red Wedding and more here. Episode 9 of House of the Dragon doesn’t include an epic battle scene or a murderous wedding but it does provide a sense of the cunning grab for power that is the game of thrones, no matter the era.
Writer and executive producer Sara Hess and director Clare Kilner do an excellent job of stripping away the glamour of the Targaryen court that we have become accustomed to in the previous eight episodes and show us, the audience, the ugly, depraved belly of the beast we have been trying to avoid. The truth is that these people are just as evil a nest of vipers as Cersei, Tywin, Stannis, Littlefinger, Varys and the rest of them were in the parent show.
The mere fact that Otto, Jason Lannister and co have been planning to brutally murder Rhaenyra and her family, the very thing that they have been saying she would do to Aegon and his kin, all along is disappointing but not surprising. Their entire reason for wanting to murder the true Heir to the Iron Throne is for power and because, quite simply, she is not a man. The blatant sexism is utterly unbelievable.
Best as Rhaenys is my MVP this episode. After nearly 30 years of being overlooked because of her gender, neglected because she is merely the wife of a Lord and being pitied for being “The Queen Who Never Was”, being imprisoned because the Greens think she will rally to the Blacks’ side, she makes them all pay f***ing attention in the only way she knows how: by literally breaking the ceiling she has been denied her entire life! Her choice to not utter the “Dracarys” command and burn the usurpers to a crisp is her way of showing that she is all powerful but can practice restraint – the measure of a true ruler.
The Larys foot fetish and mastubation scene was incredibly uncomfortable to watch but also very necessary to underline the fact that women, no matter the era, in reality or fiction, are always the victims of men and their lust for power. This scene serves to make everyone, but f*** we hope, men especially, see the disgusting way women are coerced into doing debasing things in order to get even the most basic of things from the men who lord their power over them. There is no looking away this time. It is there, in the open. Our humiliation. Their depravity. It is all there on the screen. Do not look away. See it. Understand it. Feel our pain and our shame.
Theory:
It is hard to believe that 10 weeks have flown by on a dragon so quickly and that next week’s episode is the last one we’ll have for two years!
Here’s what we can look forward to:
The source novel Fire&Blood dictates that Jace and Luke will fly to the Lords of Westeros to call their bannermen to Rhaenyra’s cause and they will both lose their lives in brutal battles. Daemon is going to take revenge for that and it will get bloody. Rhaenyra and Aegon will face off too and Larys will finally get Alicent to himself. Prepare yourselves – the Dance of the Dragons will be fiery!
House of the Dragon airs on HBO Max on Sundays and on DStv Express at 3am and M-Net Channel 101 at 9pm on Mondays.
